Successful realities of Gis-FOSS

Dutch language Chapter

mailing list

meetup group

legally recognized

Recognized by OSGeo.org in April 2012. Legal foundation (under Dutch law) since June 2013

board

(As of June 2015)

Just van den Broecke (secretary)

Barend Köbben (treasurer)

Marc Vloemans (marketing /PR) (successor of Steven Ottens)

Gert-Jan van der Weijden (chairman)

brief history

A first attempt to establish a local Dutch chapter has been made in 2007. That first incarnation of OSGeo.nl even made two consecutive bids for the FOSS4G conference.

The second "release" of OSGeo.nl started in november 2011, in a Birds-of-a-feather session at the national Dutch geospatial conference.
Our chapter was asked by OSGeo.org to organize the Open Source track at the 2012 GeoSpatial World Forum, and did this once again in 2013.
In 2012 (June, in Velp) and 2013 (November, in Delft) we organized a local Dutch OSGeo.nl day. Both days attracted 125 participants, partly the "usual suspects" of open source geospatial developers, but also a large crowd of geospatial professionals who are not common to open source yet, but want to extend their knowledge. Completed with some people from the OpenStreetMap community, and some "neo-geo" developers, made it an interesting mix of visitors.

The third annual OSGeo.nl day took place in november 2014, as part of the Dutch general geospatial congress "GeoBuzz". This attracted about 150 people, some of them visiting the OSGeo.nl workshop and presentation whole day, some of them just visiting one of two OSGeo.nl presentations.

Besides this, we organized some small events (including workshops on QGis and cartography), of course including our annual New Year drink.

Based on those achievements, we have rapidly gained an important position in the "traditional" geospatial environment in The Netherlands; the main geospatial organisations (governmental, business and science) regards us a an fully-fledged partner.

Being an foundation, we don't have an official membership. As of May 2014, our informal list of members Leden holds over 120 people.

Successful realities of Gis-FOSS

France (in Francophone Chapter)

mailing list

legally recognized or not

In September 2007 by OSGeo, French legal association from august 2008.

brief history

Create in 2006 after the Lausanne FOSS4G. This first group communicated about the Francophone Local Chapter to propose to everyone interesting in this local chapter, then we were present to the main french Trade show in april 2007. One of our biggest project is the translation of the OSGeo Journal. Finally our formal proposal has been accepted on September by the OSGeo Board.

Successful realities of Gis-FOSS

FOSSGIS: The German language Chapter (DACH)

Mailing List

number of subscribers: 120 and growing , Note: The FOSSGIS association operates several mailing lists for specific topics including the annual conference, OpenStreetMap Germany, marketing and one private list for members.

Legally Recognized or Not

The OSGeo Local Chapter is represented by the FOSSGIS e.V., which is a formal not-for-profit legal entity in Germany. FOSSGIS e.V. has > 200 members.

Brief History

The DACH-area (German language) is a very active part of the OpenSource-GIS Community. Several companies and projects acting at this field long before the creation of OSGeo. GAV (GRASS-Anwender-Vereinigung e.V.) was founded in 2000 and worked on the support of Free GIS-software and geodata. Projects like http://freegis.org have startet even earlier. The community also has strong support by companies (i.e. WhereGroup, MapMedia, Intevation, in medias res, delphi imm, ..) who organize the annual German language conference FOSSGIS. In 2008, this conference took place in Freiburg (Breisgau) in southern Germany in the hope to attract more people from Switzerland, Austria and France. The profit that was earned from all previous conferences has been sponsored to the GAV and is used to support the work of the OSGeo in DACH. By decision of the charter members, the name of GAV e.V. was changed to FOSSGIS e.V. on 20. Sept 2008 to better reflect the scope or the organization.

mailing list

legally recognized or not

brief history

Legally recognized as Italian Association since February 2007, the community has a longer history around GRASS Italian Community and its meetings since year 2000.
The mailing list is active since April 2005. Primary efforts are community knowhow, software localization, events organization, FOSS GIS lobbying in general.